Anne's nomenclature inquiry raised a question that I've had from time to
time over the past few years, so I thought I'd put it out to all of
you;

In this day of powerful databases, practically endless memory for data
entry, and sophisticated search capabilities, what are your opinions
regarding the continued use of Nomenclature?  Chenhall's work first came
out in the 70s, when memory space was at a premium (remember when memory
was measured in kilobytes instead of mega- or gigabytes, and 16K was a
standard RAM size? Or when 80 characters was all you could enter in any
data field?).  I also recall that searches were tough to do, unless you
were exactly matching the information contained in a field (and
Nomenclature made it a lot easier to do that).  It seems to me that the
issues Nomenclature was designed to address have now been largely met by
the availability and ease of use of powerful database programmes.

I know that I rarely search on nomenclature terms--rather than looking
for a particular object type, I more often search my description and
provenance fields for an object with the right history or association.
If I'm looking for Northwest Mounted Police material, it's more
important that I have standardization among "Northwest Mounted Police,"
"North West Mounted Police," "NWMP," or "N.W.M.P.," rather than making
the distinction between a cowboy boot and a riding boot.

Now, I'm not saying I'm about to cut the nomenclature fields from my
database; our database has gone through several platform changes over
the years, and in some of the earliest records with scant descriptions,
the "Object" field is the only one that will tell me what an item is!
But, if I were to start a collection's database from scratch, I really
wonder if I would include nomenclature fields, or instead rely on a
fully searchable, seemingly endless full description of the item at
hand.

Any thoughts?



------------------------------------------------------------
Tim McShane, Assistant--Cultural History
Medicine Hat Museum and Art Gallery
1302 Bomford Crescent S.W.
Medicine Hat, AB   T1A 5E6
(403) 502-8587

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